Will Coronavirus Kill Astrology?

If ever there was one, Susan Miller would be a blue-chip astrologer. So, in January, when she appeared on CBS New York and predicted that 2020 would “be a great year, and it will be a prosperous year,” people listened.

People listened when she said Capricorn would be the year’s “celestial favorite,” and that Cancer was the most likely to wed; Libra was set to score in real-estate and Taurus could expect a calendar full of international travel.

And then, people got mad because — it probably doesn’t need pointing out — things didn’t exactly go according to the stars’ plan.

“I remember a month ago, thinking: has everybody fired their astrologer?” said Divya Babbar, who subscribed to Ms. Miller’s free app last year. As a Sagittarius, Ms. Babbar had been looking forward to the year of profit Ms. Miller had predicted for her.

YouTube and Instagram users took to Ms. Miller’s feeds to complain.

“Susan, you’re a very good writer but you forgot about the Covid-19 virus and the loss of jobs,” one user sniped.

Another railed: “Why didn’t you predict this, Susan? Covid-19 was major enough to see it coming!”

Many astrologers and their followers believe that daily events are impacted by the movements and positions of celestial objects, the planets and the sun. Science says: No. Most psychologists agree that astrology’s appeal relies largely on “confirmation bias” — the human tendency to seek out, recall and favor information that confirms what we already believe.

Astrologers, the haters say, write their horoscopes in such a broad, general way that anyone could find something that applied to them, especially if they’re really looking for it. But then March 2020 arrived, and with it the dawning of a global pandemic, the magnitude and universality of which seemed to contradict not just astrology, but the very notion that each sign could have its own fate (after all, we all are facing a common threat at the moment and it doesn’t take a seer to know that most of us will be spending a lot more time at home).

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Credit...Photo illustration by Jessica Lehrman for The New York Times

So you might expect people would be having their doubts. And yet, horoscopes appear to be more popular than ever. Amid the flurry of questions that loom over our daily lives — How long will this last? Will things ever go back to normal? Can we trust the people in charge? — other, more celestially-based questions, began emerging again: Is Mercury in retrograde? When was the last time Saturn and Pluto were conjunct (as they were in January)?

According to data provided by Lucie Greene, a cultural trend analyst, Dazed and Refinery29 reported a bump in traffic to their horoscope-related stories. Dazed Beauty saw a 22 percent increase in horoscope-related traffic this quarter versus last quarter. An article by Refinery29 titled “The Super Pink Moon in Libra is Good News for Your Relationships” was one of the sites top-performing stories last month.

Comscore, a media analytics company, shows that traffic for major astrology sites like Astro, CafeAstrology, and Ms. Miller’s site, AstrologyZone, increased in March when compared to February.

“Astrology for us is a consistently high-performing category across all our sites,” said Emma Rosenblum, the editor in chief for the lifestyle category at Bustle Digital Group, overseeing content and strategy for Bustle, Elite Daily, Romper, NYLON and The Zoe Report. “In place of traditional religions and spirituality, I think some people — particularly in this time of such uncertainty — are doubling down even more on horoscopes.”

It used to be that horoscopes were more or less apolitical; they promised travel, pay raises,and, of course, locking eyes with that soul mate on your morning commute.There was very little hay to be made about the global economy, systemic inequality and other structures, which undeniably impact a person’s fate. But in recent years, the genre has moved in a more politically and financially aware direction. Basically, astrology’s gone woke.

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“Astrology should be in service to the moment,” Chani Nicholas said.Credit...Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

Chani Nicholas, dubbed “a kind of social justice astrologer,” has built a following for her thoughtful, socially-conscious astrological briefings, which often reference mental health, queer identity and progressive politics.

Ms. Nicholas said she knew 2020 would be a tough one, but it wasn’t only the stars that gave her that clue. “It’s an election year,” she said. “And election years are always tough.” Add that to growing warnings about a coming recession, and her own astrological calculations, and Ms. Nicholas felt confident in her own conjectures.

“Astrology should be in service to the moment,” Ms. Nicholas said. “This pandemic is bigger than we could have foreseen, even though we did know this year was going to be challenging. But the point now is, what can we do from here? That’s when we look to each other. We don’t keep looking to the planets.”

Steph Koyfman, a former journalist who founded The Daily Hunch, a site that offers personalized daily horoscopes, agrees that astrology can help provide tools to cope with uncertainty and the daily frustrations and fears brought on by the pandemic.

“I think astrology might offer comfort because it has a way of naming and unpacking archetypal patterns; it allows people to put words to what they’re already feeling and that helps them feel witnessed,” Ms. Koyfman said. “It’s also a way of orienting yourself in history and time. It helps take you beyond, oh my God, why is this happening to me? This is just how time works. It’s a cycle.”

Soon after the upset over her inaccurate predictions, Ms. Miller’s followers were clamoring to know how she thought the pandemic would play out.

“I was in a bad mood that day and I really should apologize to her,” said Melanie Syed-Ismail. She’d left a critical comment on Ms. Miller’s Instagram account. “I was being snarky when I shouldn’t have been.” And after reading Ms. Miller’s special coronavirus report, released in mid-March, Ms. Syed-Ismail said her faith in the astrologer was renewed.

The report laid the blame on Pluto. Apparently, the small but powerful planet “deals with huge financial matters, masses of people — and viruses.” It went on to explain why some countries were affected more than others: “Italy is ruled by Gemini, for June is the month the citizens celebrate the unification of Italy. Gemini rules the lungs, so that’s why Italy has been hit so hard — this virus attacks the lungs.”

As for the fate of the United States (a Cancer, incidentally), Ms. Miller predicted that the virus will be “raging” in March, April and May and then become weak in the summer months, only to crop back in the fall, and possibly extend as far as mid-December.